Posts Tagged ‘Amazon’

Sears and Amazon have yanked a “Swastika” ring” from their websites after a wave or angry protests on social media.

Sears apologized, explaining that the ring was a “third-party marketplace item that has since been removed for violating our guidelines.”

Amazon promoted the ring as “gothic jewelry item” that in “features a Swastika ring that’s made of .925 Thai silver.” It added that the ring is “not for Neo Nazi or any Nazi implication” and “these jewelry items are going to make you look beautiful at your next dinner date.”

Is Amazon trying to say that the past is dead, along with 6 million Jews, and that the swastika no longer can be associated with Nazism?

All that was missing was brass knuckles and an SS band in bright red and white.

Zionist Organization of American (ZOA) president Morton Klein wrote to Sears, “We were appalled to learn that swastika rings are available for purchase on the Sears website. Shockingly, these rings – identified as ‘men’s fashion punk rock style jewelry’ – were described on the Sears website as ‘jewelry items.’

“Sears should not have been selling these offensive rings in the first place, nor should it be facilitating their sale now. Doing so legitimizes an anti-Semitic symbol of hate, violence, death and murder, and shamefully tries to turn it into some kind of a fashion statement.

It is nothing of the sort… The swastika was appropriated by the Nazis and was made the official emblem of the Nazi party in Germany. Adolph Hitler said the swastika symbolized the victory of the Aryan man. The swastika is the symbol of the Nazi’s anti-Semitic agenda, which included the deliberate and systematic annihilation of the Jewish people.

It was only a few weeks ago that we were introduced to Amazon’s plan to fill the skies with a fleet of flying drones. But now it seems the excitement over having your baby wipes descend from above in less than thirty minutes is already old news. On December 24th, a patent entitled “Method and System for Anticipatory Packaging Shipping” was granted to Amazon.

The patent describes “speculative shipping” scenarios whereby packages could remain in continuous transit on trucks until a customers decided to make a purchase. In the words of the patent:

“Speculative shipping of packages may enable more sophisticated and timely management of inventory items, for example by allowing packages to begin flowing towards potential customers in advance of actual orders,”

We mentioned in “2014: The Year of the Non-Existent Product,” the inner reason why Amazon is working so hard to market themselves as an instantaneous delivery company. As stated there, the fact that a product needs to travel from a warehouse to the consumer is conceptually problematic, as we are all awaiting for the wellsprings of connected knowledge to burst forth. While tasting from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge entered the world into a state of exile of disconnection, we are anticipating a time when the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge will, as it were, be tasted while still connected to the tree.

Anticipating the New

We’ve been writing recently about anticipating headlines. It would make sense then that an article about anticipation was itself anticipated! As mentioned at the beginning, the patent was filed December 24th, but only started making headlines during this past week. From a Google News search, the first reference was on a site called 4-traders.com on January 2nd. Then on January 17th, news broke with close to 300 articles. This is an important distinction because while January 2nd corresponded to Rosh Chodesh Shevat, the class that we will now mention–from Tuesday night, January 7th–was the continuation of a series that began on Rosh Chodesh Shevat.

In our Aaron Swartz article, we mentioned the class from Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh that Wednesday morning, where he discussed having “a premonition of what will be the headlines of tomorrow’s newspaper.” What was not said was that the ability to anticipate the news corresponds to the sefirah of tiferet (beauty) according to model that was introduced called the “renewal of the Sefat Emet.” But we can go even further. In addition to anticipating the headline, we can also anticipate the concept which makes it appear new to begin with.

What makes something appear new? One approach is that we didn’t expect it. So let’s say we did expect it because we’ve been learning Torah well, as it is said of the Rogatchover Gaon, that he could connect current events with the Torah that he was learning.

But if we want this news to appear old, then we need to appreciate a greater new within ourselves. This is what Rabbi Ginsburgh called during the January 7th class the renewal of ourselves at every moment. He related this “continuous delivery” concept to the law that a Jewish convert is considered like a newborn infant. What continuous delivery are we anticipating? Instead of a UPS truck circling our block until we click the order button, we are anticipating the state we are now calling “the continuous delivery or renewal of our soul into the packaging of our body.”

Jews make up three of the 10 biggest gainers in net worth in 2013, as listed by Forbes. Among the Jews are Google co-founder Larry Page, whose mother was Jewish, who was raised without religion and who intermarried.

The biggest jump in bank accounts was that of gambling casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, whose net worth jumped $15 billion this past year to $37, making him America’s 11th richest person. Forbes noted that in day-to-day terms, Adelson earned $41 million daily, not bad for a day’s work.

The second biggest jump in “wages” was for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook’s stock offering helped his net worth more than double, to $26 million.

The third Jew is Page, who came in ninth place with an increase of $9.4 million and a net worth of $30.5 billion

The remainder are non-Jews, including four members of the Walton family of the Wal-Mart company, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.

This article has been updated to corrected the mis-identification of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as Jewish.

Amazon amounted Tuesday it is opening a Tel Aviv office to support cloud service through Amazon Web Services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006, and Amazon stated, “Israeli companies use Amazon Web Services to foster innovation, shorten time to market, and expand their global businesses. The decision to open an Amazon Web Services office in Israel demonstrates the rapidly growing customer base, the wide range of skills, and our investment to support the adoption of cloud services across the EMEA.”

The new center will employ managers, solutions engineers and a support team.

This week’s purchase of The Washington Post by Amazon’s Jewish CEO Jeff Bezos is not the first time a Jew has bailed out the newspaper.

In 1933, the Jewish investor Eugene Meyer rescued the Post from bankruptcy, acquiring it at auction at the height of the Depression. For the next 20 years, he worked to turn the struggling daily into a profitable and reputable cornerstone of the American media.

Meyer had already made headlines for his political prominence. In 1930, JTA reported his appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with the headline: “Unusual Honor for [a] Jew.”

During the same period, Herbert Hoover personally thanked him for the “high qualifications and sense of public service” that marked his tenure as Farm Loan Commissioner.

Meyer served as chairman of the Washington Post Company until his death in 1959, taking only a short break, in 1946, to serve as the first head of the World Bank. The Post was presided over by his family for four generations. Meyer’s daughter, Katharine Graham, a legendary Washington socialite and one of the first women in America to attain prominence at the helm of a media organization, was publisher during the Watergate era, when the Post helped bring down Nixon.

Meyer’s great-granddaughter and the paper’s current publisher, Katharine Weymouth, announced the sale on Monday.

President Shimon Peres has the new distinction of being the first person to be featured on Amazon’s Kindle Single interview series that will feature world leaders.

Thursday’s debut is featured under the title “The Optimist,” a fitting description for a man who has preached peace agreements, such as the Oslo Accord, even if they cause war.

He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, sharing it with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and with arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, who exploited world Anti-Zionism to wear the mantle of peace by keeping a pistol by his hip.

Peres is 89 years old although most of the world considers him to be 90 because of pre-birthday celebrations that began two months before his Gregorian calendar birthday on August 2. He will be 90 on the Hebrew calendar this coming Shabbat.

The interview that is available on Kindle Singles was carried out by David Samuels, in association with the online Tablet Magazine. Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper’s and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

“In September of 1962, novelist Alex Haley’s conversation with Miles Davis launched the Playboy Interview, and pioneered the idea of a long-form, extended dialogue with the great personalities of our time,” said David Blum, editor of Kindle Singles. “We hope to carry forward that tradition, and use the unlimited digital space to engage great artists and thinkers in conversation with skilled writers and interviewers.”

Kindle Singles was launched in 2011, and the interviews with world leaders is a new platform for the company.